When a Kiss Isn’t Just a Kiss

News photographers are always urged to write detailed captions about their photos, and with good reason.

Alfred Eisenstaedt failed to do so with his renowned image of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on Aug. 14, 1945, during the celebration to mark V-J Day, the end of World War II.

As The Associated Press recently reported, Lois Gibson, a forensic artist with the Houston Police Department, is claiming that she has conclusively determined that the sailor in the photograph is Glenn McDuffie, 80, a North Carolina native who played semiprofessional baseball and worked in construction and for the Postal Service.

Glenn McDuffie holding a portrait of himself as a young man, left, and a copy of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photgraph. McDuffie says he is the sailor in the image. (Photo:Pat Sullivan/Associated Press)

Ms. Gibson, who has 25 years of experience helping the police to track suspects, had Mr. McDuffie dress as a sailor and recreate the pose, this time with a pillow instead of the nurse. “She measured his ears, facial bones, hairline, wrist, knuckles and hand, and compared those to enlargements of Eisenstaedt’s picture,” The A.P. reported.

Alas, Ms. Gibson’s claims will probably not settle the matter. In 1980, Life Magazine counted 11 men — not including Mr. McDuffie — who said they were the sailor in the photo. The men included a Rhode Island fisherman, a New Jersey history teacher and a Harvard University refrigeration mechanic.

As of 1995, three women had stepped forward saying they were the nurse in the photo. Of the three, Edith Shain, a kindergarten teacher in Beverly Hills, Calif., seemed to state the strongest case — or at least the earliest. In 1980, she wrote a letter to Eisenstaedt claiming to be the nurse in the photo, and Eisenstaedt flew to California to photograph her for Life. Eisenstaedt died in 1995.

Lois Gibson, a forensic artist with the Houston Police Department’s, says she has proved that Glenn McDuffie is the sailor in Eisenstaedt’s photograph. (Pat Sullivan/Associated Press)

For now, Life’s position is that the identity of the couple remains a mystery. The A.P. quoted Robert Sullivan, the editorial director of Life Books, as saying: “The recent (claims) are ‘CSI’ type of inquiries. We think that’s great, but we just can’t know for sure on our end. We can’t be in a position of anointing one or the other without hard proof.”

(Life Magazine itself has become history. The storied picture weekly ceased publication in 2000 but was revived in 2004 as a Sunday newspaper supplement. It folded again in April, but continues to exist on the Web.)

The very youngest service members who served in World War II are now nearly 80, so the time for such claims may be coming to an end. But it’s not surprising that so many people would care about the photograph. The art critic Michael Kimmelman wrote in The Times in 1997:

The most famous photograph of Times Square is surely Alfred Eisenstaedt’s chestnut of the kissing couple, which summed up the national mood in 1945 because it combined all the right elements: the returning soldier, the woman who welcomed him back and Times Square, the crossroads that symbolized home.

The Times Square kiss lives on, in a fashion. Next week, at 1 p.m. on Aug. 14, the Times Square Alliance, a business improvement district, will stage a re-enactment of the kiss, as it has done for several years. Andrea Elliott described the reenactment in 2005.

Françoise Bornet, in 2005, with a print of the Doisneau photograph in which she appears. (Photo: Eric Feferberg/Getty Images)

Another famous image of a kiss is Robert Doisneau’s “The Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville,” taken on a Parisian street in 1950. Alas, the image — considered one of the most romantic ever taken and widely reproduced since 1986, when it was first printed as a poster — has a less happy story. As Hélène Fouquet reported, in 1993, a former actress, Françoise Bornet, emerged from anonymity when she sued Doisneau for $18,000 and a share of the royalty in the image. The case was dismissed, but during the proceedings Doisneau revealed that the scene had been staged. Doisneau died in 1994. Ms. Bornet sold her original print of the photograph for $242,000 at an auction; the rights remained with Doisneau’s agency.

(Unlike the Doisneau photo, the Eisenstaedt kiss does not appear to have been staged. A 1996 editorial in The Wall Street Journal cited a man claiming that his friend was the “kissing sailor” and had been egged on by the photographer. But according to a 1997 letter to The Times by Jay Lovinger, then the managing editor of Life, that claim was debunked when it turned out the man was referring to a different photo, taken on V-E Day. Also, that man described the photographer as “not a small man” — Eisenstaedt was 5 feet, 4 inches tall.)

Alfred Eisenstaedt’s image of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day in 1945. (Photo: Alfred Eisenstaedt, Time-Life/Getty Images)

“The Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville,” taken in Paris in 1950. (Photo: Robert Doisneau)

I am still grappling with the picture of the Times Square kiss by Eisenstaedt. it is a great photograph, but the meaning is not at all clear to me. The nurse is definitely not a willing participant in this kiss, and instead of loving welcome and a consenting couple I see semi-clenched fists by the sailor and an attempt to hold down her skirt and posssibly even push back the sailor on the part of the woman who seems to almosthave lost her bearing. So what does the return of peace mean for the women who have done their part in the war effort? The picture, if seen from the perspective of th ewoman, may not be an overly happ one.

I’m tooting my own horn here, but readers interested in the continuing fascination with Eisenstaedt’s Kiss photo may wish to about it in No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, which I co-authored with John Lucaites. We discuss the photo in respect to its original context and with regard to subsequent imitations such as a New Yorker cover and the Times Square re-enactments. We’ve also posted on this most recent claim about the sailor in the picture at our new blog: //www.nocaptionneeded.com.

Are we looking at the same photo?? The first post seems to me a rather distorted view of a very romantic and passionate kiss. Not everything is about the subjugation of women by men… and I say this as someone who proudly calls herself a feminist! “A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.” ~Ingrid Bergman

I have to agree with Eckhard. The body language has always looked strange to me. I don’t think there’s any proof for coercion, but neither is there much evidence for happy couplehood. I think it’s ambiguous at best, not clearly romantic.

[Just as an aside, we do the same thing in other contexts…everyone paints the Sally Hemings / Thomas Jefferson relationahip as a “romance,” when there is absolutely no evidence that it was, or that he cared at all about her consent.]

The experts seem to agree that the Eisenstaedt photo, unlike the Doisneau photo, was not staged and in fact depicts a spontaneous kiss. We have updated the post (see above) to answer your question. Thank you for reading.

I attended a lecture by Eisenstaedt in the early 1990s in which he discussed in detail his Times Square photo. According to my recollection, Eisenstaedt recounted that the kiss was not staged, nor did it seem that the two knew each other. The photographer had seen the sailor rushing through the crowd kissing women, had noted the nurse in the sailor’s path, and had waited for the two to embrace in order to achieve maximum contrast between the dark sailor’s uniform and white nurse’s outfit. Regardless or its origins, I think that the photo captures the exuberance of the public upon the announcement of the end of the war.

I spent a day with Eisie when he was shooting a story in Massachusetts. His style was consistently, determinedly “candid,” in other words floating around his subjects and getting them to ignore him, not making any pose suggestions or talking at all. Very smooth technique. The idea that he asked the sailor and nurse to pose is silly. He was a tiny, shy, quiet, almost invisible presence.

She’s dressed to the nines, her hair upswept, her hemline high. She’s out of place in the middle of Times Square, but she’s there for a reason – to entice a man, a man in uniform, a hero of the total victory.

Yep, the man’s just an innocent fellow swept up in the end of war, enthusiastic, but she’s the vixen.

As usual, the 21st century vixenhood stands by their woman, claiming she is innocent despite what the evidence right before their eyes would indicate. As usual man is the innocent party.

Wait – did anyone else follow the Provo link to find that the Provo shot isn’t the same photo as the one here? Were there multiple photos or was the Provo woman doctored into a different shot? Are we all referring to multiple pictures as one, or did the Prove newspaper get taken by an old lady with Photoshop?

There are two photos: the one by Eisenstaedt and a nearly identical shot by Navy photographer Victor Jorgensen. The Jorgensen photo is public domain (it’s free), which is why it is used often in posters, advertisements, and the like. The Eisenstaedt photo has had the benefit of Time/Life promotion, but they also have controlled distribution. Most people never notice the differences between the two images.

Wow…what a bunch of party poopers…quit analyaing the dang thing. He was excited, running through the streets to celebrate, grabbed her and kissed her. It’s wonderful and that’s all it was – a KISS! It’s a celebration of victory after 4 1/2 long, horrible years of sacrifice and suffering! She looks none the worse for wear and he’s not touching her inappropriately. To all of you fuddy-duddies…get a life!

An important difference here is that the Paris kiss is a “private” moment in a public space. Notice how all of the passers-by are going about their business w/o even noticing (the women in the back seems to be aware but is trying not to notice, thus to grant the privacy that sexual intimacy demands). In Times Square, however, we have a “public kiss.” Notice that the passers-by are clearly observing the event, and approvingly so, rather like we tend to acknowledge and smile at young love. And indeed, it is a rather chaste kiss in many respects. Indeed, the original was published in an article in Life along with 12-13 other pictures of kissing soldiers/sailors, and everyone of them is far more transgressive — even lascivious in some regards — than this, which is, as someone above indicated, ambiguous at worst.

I agree with Annette. It is a kiss-plain and simple. When did we become a society that has to label everything(past, present or future) as good or bad. I certainly don’t see the woman raising her arm to fight off the sailor. They both seem to be enjoying themselves. So let it be what it is—a joyous time for our service men and women and the people at home waiting for them.

To the commenter who called it a rape; shame on you. Actual rape is too horrendous an act to be cheapened by association with this relatively innocuous event.

Anyone who has seen more than a few candid photos, which I would imagine includes everyone reading this item, will be aware that a camera captures only a fleeting easily misinterpreted moment. Who knows what happened in the next instant? Did her hand, clutched by her side, relax and stroke his hair? Did she summon the courage to push him away and flee, or give him a scolding? Did she laugh and walk on, adjusting her hat and blushing a bit, but smiling nonetheless?

It’s impossible for anyone here to know whether or not the woman enjoyed the kiss. It’s entirely possible that, taken by surprise by being grabbed by a stranger, she didn’t know how to react, and numbly submitted to the awful action that was being visited upon her, while praying someone would come to her aid. On the other hand, she may have found it very romantic that a handsome young sailor was kissing her in the middle of Times Square, at a moment of such national ecstacy.

Who knows? None of us. All we can do is interpret the captured moment, using our own preconceptions.

Virgil

PS. for my two cents, the photo of young Mr. McDuffie in his uniform looks more like the saior in the photo than any other I’ve seen.

The forties were a sexually tense time compared to today. Timeshift yourself to Times Square 1945 and you’ll find happy people wandering all over (no cars!) just wondering what celebratory deed could do justice to the amazing, wonderful moment. Sprinkle in a few dozen uniformed men and (sometimes uniformed) women, and (realizing that a kiss was a huge deal then) let them catch eachother’s eyes, and you have a chain-reacting event that must have happened a hundred times near there in five minutes. One of them gets photographed (twice), add 62 years, and we have an opportunity for the idiot fringe to cry rape and seduction. It’s just people, people, and remember that Japan was the aggressor, not those happy kids.

Recent kiss of Richard Gere to Shilpa Shetty (Indian Actoress) in India was similiar to one given by Sailor to Nurse at Times Square but it was very much passionate. It was shown all over country on T.V and invited hell for both of them,there were legal suits filed in many courts which are still pending.This is because Indian culture does not permit such display of affection. Poor Richard will think twice before kissing lady in India.

I agree that it looks as if he just grabbed her and kissed her. The way her arm is squished between them show she wasn’t expecting the embrace, and hadn’t put her arms out for it. Even so, it’s a great and emotinal picture. I wouldn’t care if it had been staged, or if he’d grabbed her. There’s still a good feeling to it. :)

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